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Habitat

The critically endangered southern resident killer whale population now numbers 74 individuals. The ability of the population to recover is hindered by a perfect storm of threats—not enough salmon, too much noise, and toxic chemicals affecting calf survival—but lack of access to salmon is at the eye of that storm. We need to […]

Southern resident killer whales are in decline. Our recent population viability analysis on southern resident killer whales predicted that, if threats remained constant, it should take several decades for the population to decline from 80 to 75 whales. In fact, that decline took only three years. We fear that the decline is accelerating, and we […]

Did you know two species of river ‪dolphin‬ live in the ‪Amazon‬? The pink one is called ‪boto‬, or Inia; the grey one is called ‪tucuxi‬, or Sotalia. Both are gorgeous, ancient species that have become adapted to live their entire lives in freshwater. They are also incredibly tough to spot in muddy waters, and have a […]

We’re so grateful for this week’s special guest post from Inge van der Knaap, a Erasmus Mundus Master’s student in Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. Inge and her assistant, Sofya Reger, recently completed a beautiful experiment on noise and fish in collaboration with Salmon Coast Field Station. Inge produced a great video introducing people to her study. […]

It’s not rocket science. Much of the work we do involves conserving whale & dolphin populations by identifying the habitats most critical to their survival, and keeping the habitat quiet, and full of fish. We’ve published extensively on the value of Marine Protected Areas to survival of endangered killer whale populations. This week, we’re thrilled to […]

We recently published a paper reporting ocean noise levels in important whale habitats along the BC coast. At the same time, we released an animation that outlined the key concepts. Our research showed that the most important habitats for killer whales were the noisiest; important habitats for humpback whales were comparatively quiet. We thought you […]

[vsw id=”77623625″ source=”vimeo” width=”425″ height=”344″ autoplay=”no”] Sound is as important to whales as vision is to humans. Our scientific research (with Chris Clark and Dimitri Ponirakis at Cornell University’s Bioacoustics Research Program) is measuring how noisy or quiet important habitats are to fin, humpback and killer whales in British Columbia, Canada, and how we think […]

Today, President Barack Obama designated five new national monuments, including Cattle Point on San Juan Island in Washington state. This is exciting news, not only because Cattle Point is beautiful and has historic relevance, but because important feeding habitat of one of the most critically endangered marine mammal populations in the US is just off Cattle […]

We recently partnered with two acousticians, Christine Erbe of Curtin University and Alex MacGillivray of JASCO, to predict how BC’s waters sound to a whale. Using shipping traffic data compiled by Patrick O’Hara (which we used previously in a ship strike analysis for fin, humpback and killer whales), and making some assumptions about how noisy […]

Rob and his colleagues published a neat new paper today in the open access journal, PLOS ONE. The paper, led by Dr Kristin Kaschner at the University of Freiburg, examined >1100 estimates of the abundance of whales, dolphins and porpoises reported in more than 400 surveys conducted worldwide between 1975 and 2005. It is […]